Due South: "Eclipse"
Sep. 22nd, 2008 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"Eclipse" (DS 3.2)
Original air date: September 21, 1997
Favorite quote:
RAY: [theatrically overcome with grief] Mom, I'm so sorry! I just wanted to see your face one last time!
[Ray wrenches the casket open]
JIMMY: Hey, you can't do that!
RAY: Mom, how you've changed. Into Cuban cigars.
Spoilers.
I need to state for the record that Callum Keith Rennie is Sex. On. A. Stick. And I would happily watch him do the goddamn dishes.
Okay, moving on.
This episode has two themes weirdly tangled up in each other: revenge and grief. On the revenge side, we've got Ray seeking revenge on Marcus Ellery and Brandauer seeking revenge on Welsh. The link between the two is made plain by Fraser's Bacon quote:
FRASER: You know, Ray, Francis Bacon once wrote that revenge is a kind of wild justice which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
RAY: Did Francis Bacon ever meet Marcus Ellery?
FRASER: It's unlikely. Bacon died in 1626.
RAY: Well, there you go. If he had, he woulda whistled a different tune.
Ray is very clear that his vendetta against Ellery is extralegal; Brandauer, on the other hand, is trying to use the law to get revenge on Welsh. And one way we know that Brandauer is the antagonist and Ray the protagonist is that while Brandauer is defeated in the end, Ray lets go of his quest for revenge and in fact reaffirms his own relationship with the law:
RAY: Thanks.
ELLERY: For what?
RAY: For making me what I am. A cop.
That's the more obvious and surfacy theme, but I think that grief may be the more important. "I think he's grieving," Fraser says of Diefenbaker. "His breed is uncommonly sensitive. They feel sorrow profoundly." (Notice also that this line is accompanied by Ray slamming his binoculars into the grille of the crypt window in a gesture of frustration: again pointing to the fact that whatever Ray may feel, it's most likely to get expressed physically, and as anger.) And this ties back to one of the two conversations that seem to me to be the heart of the episode:
FRASER: I didn't realize you were married.
RAY: I was. Not anymore.
BRONCO: That is so sad.
RAY: Two careers, she worked at the State's Attorney's office. Just didn't work out.
JIMMY: Oh, I recognize that tone of voice. That's a "Hey, it's no big deal" tone of voice, you know?
BRONCO: He would know. His wife left him. He was a broken window. Glass everywhere.
GLADYS: What about you, dear? Are you married?
FRASER: No, ma'am, I'm not. But I am acquainted with loss and, on occasion, loneliness.
GLADYS: Oh, yes. Loneliness. It may sound silly, but I wonder how the sun will feel today when it's blocked out by the moon.
FRASER: Yes. It does seem sometimes as though the border between life and death is very poorly guarded.
BRONCO: Yep. And if you're carrying the wrong passport, you wind up in a lower drawer in one of these places.
JIMMY: The thing is, who the hell has all the passports? I mean, I wouldn't be here if I had the other passports, you know?
FRASER: Or would you? That's the question, isn't it?
RAY: Right. Right. Like you can't go forward until you go backward. Look, I tried to run away from my past, but you can't do it 'cause it's in your skin, it stays with you. You gotta retrace your steps to figure out how you got here.
(Parenthetically, I love the description of Jimmy as a broken window, and I love that they gave it to a Cuban cigar smuggler. Also, I love it because, as we're going to see, it's an incredibly apt description of Ray, too.)
Grief is what ties these very disparate characters together--Ray, Fraser, Gladys, and Jimmy. And Diefenbaker. And it makes it appropriate that Ray is staking out a graveyard. He's mourning the death of something he himself doesn't know how to explain--in fact, he's mourning a lot of things. But one is the person he thinks he would have been if not for Marcus Ellery:
RAY: Me, I never wanted to be a cop in the first place. Always wanted to be something else.
FRASER: Why didn't you become something else?
RAY: That is the reason I am here today.
A second is his relationship with Stella--not just his marriage, but the entire story of it. I was realizing as I rewatched that Ray's reactions would not be off if we were to learn that Stella was dead, and the fact that Stella isn't dead does not trivialize Ray's grief, just as the Cuban cigar smuggler becomes "a broken window" when his wife leaves him. But Ray's relationship with Stella is all tangled up, at least in his head, with his relationship with Marcus Ellery. He can't talk about one without talking about the other. He's determined that the relationship with Ellery will end one way or another during the eclipse, and part of what fuels his rage and grief is that, on some level, that means that his relationship with Stella is ending, too. (Not that Ray doesn't continue to try to have a relationship with Stella, but I think all of us, including Ray, know it's doomed.)
And finally, I think Ray is mourning for himself. He confesses to Ellery that he intended, maybe, to kill him, but he tells the people in the crypt, "My whole life, it starts and ends with this one guy." This is a terminus for Ray; whether he intends to kill himself, get himself killed, or is simply not thinking past the confrontation with Ellery, he sees this as a very clear ending. And the symbolism backs him up. He falls with Ellery into Ellery's mother's open grave (I learn from the IMDb that Peter Bray, who played Ellery, was 6'7", so the fact that Ray is absolutely dwarfed by him--which I think loops back very interestingly to Ray's childhood memory--is in one sense fortuitous, but in another sense deliberate, since no one else is ever in frame with Ellery at the graveyard), the eclipse moves over them, and then Ray is lying in the grave alone, with the dreamcatcher on his chest. (And, yes, it's somewhere between surrealism and contrarealism that Ellery got out of that grave without either (a.) help or (b.) squashing Ray like a bug.)
But that isn't the end. Ray isn't dead. And I think it also matters tremendously that it's Fraser who comes and pulls him out, who helps him to resurrect himself symbolically, if not literally. (Ray yanking him into the grave and walking off is another of those things I categorize under Ray's childlike-ness. You do it because it's funny, not because you've thought about it.)
Ray was already, in "Burning Down the House," talking about this assignment as a new life, a chance to reinvent himself, and that register is revisited in this episode:
RAY: You know, Fraser, when they offered me this assignment, they made it sound kind of normal. They say, Hey, Ray, here's a chance to start over, ditch the past. What's the catch? I say. Oh, your partner's Canadian. Canadian? I got nothing against Canadians except for the time when they won the World Series--
FRASER: Two times.
RAY: --which I'm willing to overlook.
FRASER: Thank you.
RAY: But at no time did they say, Oh by the way, you'll be working with a Mountie who's got a wolf who's a florist.
Later, of course, Ray himself expressly disavows this idea in the passage I quoted earlier: "I tried to run away from my past, but you can't do it 'cause it's in your skin, it stays with you." But this is still a chance at something completely new, and that something is largely represented by Ray's relationship with Fraser. He's clearly gotten spooked since "Burning Down the House," since they reprise their argument from the end of that episode with the roles reversed:
RAY: You invade my castle, you track me down, you almost get your head shot off--you wanna tell me why?
FRASER: Well, two reasons. First, I brought you a present.
RAY: For what?
FRASER: For your birthday.
RAY: It's not my birthday.
FRASER: Yes, it is.
RAY: No, it's not.
FRASER: Well, I think you're wrong about that. Y'see, Ray Vecchio was born--
RAY: Hey, let's . . . just drop that, okay, Fraser? You and I both know I'm not Ray Vecchio.
FRASER: You're not?
RAY: No.
FRASER: You're sure about that?
RAY: I don't even look like him.
FRASER: Well, you could've had plastic surgery.
RAY: You are unhinged.
FRASER: You think?
RAY: Yes, I think. Look, I'm not Ray. I mean, I am Ray, but I'm not Ray Vecchio. I'm . . . Kowalski. Stanley Raymond Kowalski.
FRASER: Your name is Stanley Kowalski?
RAY: Look, my dad had a thing for Brando. Me, it was always Steve McQueen. So I go by Ray.
FRASER: Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Ray Kowalski.
In the comments on my "BDtH" post,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heresluck and I advanced the theory that Ray is a stray cat, and I think what's going on here is that Ray is trying to put on the brakes, trying to keep Fraser from getting too close. "Most tenants I get to know," his landlady tells Fraser. "But him? Very secretive." Ray Kowalski is a loner, and Fraser's offered friendship makes him nervous. He's trying to get Fraser to back off (FRASER: Who's the target? RAY: None of your business.) and Fraser won't go. I said in my post on "The Blue Line" (and pardon me while I commit the ultimate narcissism of quoting myself): "In this, as in so many other things, Fraser seems to have been equipped with a toggle switch where most people have a dimmer. [...] as far as personal relationships are concerned, once he's given his loyalty, it is apparently literally impossible to make him take it back." Fraser has decided Ray is his friend, and that's the end of it (at least until things get more complicated--and a thousand blessings on Paul Gross and the other writers for making things get more complicated--but we aren't there yet). There are two important things about Fraser's friendship with Ray in this episode. One is about Fraser: he comes after Ray to make him go back to the station to protect Ray Vecchio. He can't budge him, so he stays, though not without nagging. But then, after Ellery has failed to show up for the funeral, Fraser, instead of saying, Now will you come back to the station? says, "Y'know, Ray, I'm pretty sure he'll come. We have time." Fraser hasn't set aside his loyalty to Ray Vecchio, but he has also managed to see past that loyalty, to see that Ray Kowalski, not being a snowmobile part, really does have something more important he has to do.
The second thing, which happens right before the very symbolic dreamcatcher-confrontation-resurrection sequence, is (I think) that Fraser gives Ray back himself (and this is the second conversation I think is the heart of the episode):
RAY: I lied, you know.
FRASER: You did?
RAY: Yeah. About Stella, to Stella. When I was in the bank--she thought I humiliated myself on purpose to stall for time so she could get away. I never told her any different. She thought I was a hero. I played along. Whole marriage based on a lie. I was a con job then, and I'm a con job now.
FRASER: Y'know, Ray, in my limited experience with the subject, I've found that very few life-long bonds are formed based on whether one partner or the other urinated in their clothing. I am willing to gamble--not with money, mind you, but I am willing to gamble that Stella looked beyond that one incident and saw the whole person.
RAY: Whaddya mean?
FRASER: In December 1988, a young boy was being held in a warehouse. You went in, even though you knew your cover had been blown. You drew fire, you were wounded, yet you managed to rescue the boy, your first citation. In December 1990, in a jewelry store, you single-handedly held off three gunmen, saving four innocent lives. Your second citation. In September 1993, you [Ray tries to stop him, but Fraser just keeps going] faced down three murderers and you brought them to justice. Your third citation. You're a good policeman, Ray, and I would be proud to call you my partner. And my friend.
Fraser is reminding Ray that there is more to him than the con job he calls himself. (Also notice the way that we go from talking about Stella and Ray's marriage to Fraser and Ray's partnership.) He's giving Ray back something that clearly Ray has lost, his ability to identify himself as a cop and to be proud of it. And the question of identity, as I said about "BDtH" is tremendously important. In this episode, again, it's couched explicitly in terms of how Ray got to be where he is. And the question being posed is whether a person has to stay inside the identity created by answering that question, or if they can choose to be somebody else. Ray has obviously gotten trapped in thinking he can only be that shamed and terrified thirteen-year-old boy, that that's the only thing that defines him. So it is a lovely and generous thing Fraser does in telling Ray a different story, a different answer to the question.
Ray talks a good line of cynicism, much like Ray Vecchio does:
RAY: Look, Fraser. I've humped this job for a long time. Bad hours, bad food, and bad guys. And for what?
FRASER: For the pride and honor of knowing that we make it possible for good people to tuck their kids in at night, turn out the lights, and know they'll be safe.
RAY: You gotta be kidding me.
FRASER: No, I'm not.
RAY: You believe all that?
FRASER: Yes, I do.
RAY: Never doubt it?
FRASER: Never.
But this, like his repeated assertion in "BDtH" that he doesn't risk his neck for anybody, is conclusively proven in "Eclipse" to be untrue. The citations Fraser lists demonstrate that Ray does risk his neck for other people, and unlike Ray Vecchio, who has to be cajoled, nudged, harassed, and herded into helping people outside the confines of his job (see, for example, "White Men Can't Jump to Conclusions"), Ray Kowalski sees something suspicious and he heads straight for it, despite the fact that he is emphatically in this graveyard on personal business:
RAY: Oh, that's good.
FRASER: Is this the target of the stake-out?
RAY: Nah, just something's queer. Let's check it out.
Ray is a good cop, and I think the key tenet of his resurrection is his own recognition of that fact and of the fact that it's something he wants to be--something worth being.
Other matters, in no particular order:
*heart*Ray's glasses*heart*
Also, Dief. For everything ever.
I like the little sideswipe at romantic conventions (we are going to come back to this like a ton of bricks in "Strange Bedfellows"):
BRONCO: So, did you get the girl?
RAY: Yeah, I got the girl. That was Stella, my wife.
BRONCO: She married you even after, you know, what you did.
RAY: Yeah, but that's not the point.
Sure, Ray "gets the girl." But he gets her via the opposite of heroism (public humiliation and then lying about it), and he doesn't get to keep her. The fairy tale only has a happy ending if you know when to stop.
I wonder if I was subliminally remembering this exchange when I started using the metaphor of Fraser as grail knight:
RAY: I'm like one of those, um, whatchamacallem, knights looking for the Holy Grill.
FRASER: Grail.
RAY: What?
FRASER: Holy Grail.
RAY: You sure?
FRASER: I'm pretty sure it's not a diner.
RAY: Grill, Grail, whatever. I'm just trying to settle an old debt.
Either way, this is a place where we see a correspondence between Ray and Fraser. Grail knights.
Also, notice here that Ray doesn't like being corrected. And Fraser's vocabulary ("germane," "prudent") makes him nervous.
On the subject of Ray's glasses.
It is necessary for one's peace of mind to assume that Ray's glasses are symbolic. Because if his vision is really as bad as this episode shows, he really really really should not be driving without them. But I think they are symbolic:
FRASER: Y'know, I don't mean to be critical, but you might want to consider some remedial practice on the target range.
RAY: Hey. I'm a good shot.
FRASER: By what criteria? You fired seven rounds--you haven't been within fifty meters of your target.
RAY: I'm a good shot, I just need my glasses. I also left them in the tomb.
FRASER: No, you didn't. Here.
RAY: Why didn't you tell me you had 'em?
FRASER: Well, I didn't realize you were blind.
RAY: I'm not blind, I just don't see all that good.
And then Ray stands up and shoots the guns out of Jimmy and Bronco's hands. This shows us that not all of Ray's claims are braggadocio; he is in fact a superlatively good shot. But only with his glasses on. Like the opposite of Clark Kent, who takes his glasses off to become Superman.
This is also one of the very few--possibly the only--place in the episode where Fraser is provoked out of his Batman voice. He's being very Mountie, with the cabbage and the trout, and that graceful obliviousness to Ray's hostility. So at the same time that he's reaching out to Ray, he's also protecting himself by retreating into his armor, just as he deflates the act of giving Ray the dreamcatcher by (a.) doing it under gunfire and (b.) extended persiflage on the subject of eagle feathers, transferring Ray's (and our) attention from the gift to the stick-up-the-ass pedantry.
(As it happens, the National Eagle Repository does exist. However, you must be enrolled in a federally recognized tribe to get a feather or other part of a dead eagle. Also, the repository is in Denver.)
Ray calls Fraser a freak four times in this episode.
1. FRASER: It's your birthday present. I dropped it.
RAY: Are you a freak?
2. RAY: What are you talking about?
FRASER: The eagle feather.
RAY: You are a freak.
3. As Fraser is carrying Gladys toward the crypt.
4. FRASER: You know, Ray, my father once told me that the sky isn't just above you, that if you look at the horizon you'll see that it actually touches the ground. So if you think about it, wherever you go, you are actually walking in the sky.
RAY: You're a freak.
FRASER: Understood.
The first time is at least derogatory by implication, but by the fourth time, it's morphed into a kind of affectionate code.
And then, of course, there's the question of the homoerotic subtext, which is actually in this episode not so much with the sub:
RAY: Can I ask you something? Do you find me attractive?
JIMMY: Well, I wouldn't say "attractive."
BRONCO: No. "Cute," maybe.
GLADYS: Well, I'd say "well-favored."
RAY: Did I ask you?
JIMMY: Sorry. I thought you were asking all of us.
RAY: Well, I wasn't. So zip. [to Fraser] Well? Find me attractive?
FRASER: In what sense?
RAY: In the sense of, you know, you being a woman?
FRASER: Do I think you're an attractive woman?
RAY: No. No. I'm not the woman. You're the woman.
FRASER: I'm the woman.
GLADYS: No, I'm a woman.
RAY: Butt out.
BRONCO: Well, she is.
RAY: Well, I know she's a woman. I'm asking Fraser to pretend he's a woman. Okay?
GLADYS: Oh. Can you do that, dear?
FRASER: Well, I have done that, yes.
JIMMY: So have I. It was rather fun.
[Bronco sniggers]
RAY: Look, you three zip. And you--you pretend you're a woman, okay? . . . D'you find me attractive?
FRASER: Very much so, yes.
RAY: You're not just saying that?
FRASER: Well, I'm not really qualified to judge, Ray.
[Ray starts laughing]
GLADYS: What's funny about that? He isn't.
RAY: It just sounds like something my wife would say.
There is no getting around the sheer weirdness of Ray's question. He never explains why he wants to know. It's certainly not that he's looking for general opinions, or he'd be more receptive to the contributions from the peanut gallery. He wants Fraser's opinion. And he makes Fraser very uncomfortable with it, too. Mounties are not supposed to shift from foot to foot like that. It's not being asked to imagine he's a woman that makes Fraser nervous; as he says, he's done that before. Also notice that, as with the conversation about Ray's citations, Fraser and Stella seem to be mutually substitutable variables.
And then there's the question of Ray Vecchio and those nine kilograms of heroin. Ray Vecchio's probity is not in doubt--FRASER: Ray Vecchio is not corrupt, sir. WELSH: Oh yeah. You know that and I know that.--except that, well, apparently there are nine kilograms of heroin missing. And Brandauer's hatchet job fails because Ray Kowalski is not Ray Vecchio and the snitch Siracusa can't pick him out of the line-up. We don't know how things would have gone if Ray Vecchio had actually been there. Could Siracusa have fingered him? We know Ray Vecchio is honest, but at the same time, his bacon is saved at the end of the episode, not by a ringing defense of his character, but by some superb brinksmanship on Ray Kowalski's part. We don't get answers.
Again, there's a lot more pure wordplay in this episode than has hitherto been the case. For instance, this riddling exchange between Ray and Tom the caretaker:
TOM: This thing doesn't work.
RAY: Whaddya mean it doesn't work? It's just a bottle. It doesn't work or not work.
TOM: If nothing comes out of it, what is it?
RAY: It's empty.
TOM: But it isn't empty. So it must be broken.
RAY: If it was broken, it'd be empty.
TOM: Exactly. So. It's not working!
[Ray breaks off the neck of the bottle with his knife]
RAY: There. Now it's broken, and it's working.
TOM: Good man.
It occurs to me that Ray may, in this episode, be going through a kind of fairytale katabasis (the descent to the underworld). He leaves his normal world behind (the police station and the repeated and repeatedly ignored phonecalls from Welsh), he encounters a guardian figure and solves the riddle (Tom), he's staking out a graveyard from a crypt, for crying out loud, he meets a ghost from his past, literally falls into a grave (I don't know of any canonical associations of katabases with eclipses, but it sure makes sense), and returns, a stronger man, to his normal world.
If they did that on purpose, it's really intensely clever.
And, because I am a complete sucker for the meta, I love this exchange:
FRASER: So you need Ray Vecchio.
WELSH: By end of shift. Five o' clock.
FRASER: Which one, sir?
WELSH: Which one what?
FRASER: Which Ray Vecchio. The detective formerly known as Ray Vecchio or the current detective known as the former Ray Vecchio?
WELSH: I can't go in there and tell them that Ray Vecchio is undercover on another operation and that this guy at the desk is not the real Ray Vecchio. If I do, these morons'll have it on the six o' clock news, and Ray Vecchio will end up as the dead body leading off at eleven. See? The only way to handle this is we gotta bluff it out.
Once again, the implausible pretense is shifted from the production level where it would be on a normal TV show (Callum Keith Rennie is not David Marciano, but we have to pretend he is) to the story level (Ray Kowalski is not Ray Vecchio, but we have to pretend he is). And once again, the fulcrum for the shift is Welsh.
I'm going to end with the beginning: the dialogue-less sequence in Ray's apartment. Which I love for myriad reasons. One is the amount that Callum Keith Rennie conveys with his face and body. Two is the fact that we're being given the chance to watch Ray assembling his game face. Notice the layers. From tank top to white t-shirt to dark colored t-shirt and the overcoat. Three, the clutter of Ray's apartment (which I only wish my eyesight was good enough to make out more clearly): as I said, this is world-building, not just setting. Four: Ray, is it honestly too much effort to boil water? And I love the face he makes when he tastes his impromptu mocha.
Ray is a difficult and complicated person, and he has an existence separate from Fraser. The show is clearly putting a good deal of thought and effort into making that happen, making Fraser understand--and us as well--that unlike Ray Vecchio, he can't take anything about this Ray for granted.
Original air date: September 21, 1997
Favorite quote:
RAY: [theatrically overcome with grief] Mom, I'm so sorry! I just wanted to see your face one last time!
[Ray wrenches the casket open]
JIMMY: Hey, you can't do that!
RAY: Mom, how you've changed. Into Cuban cigars.
Spoilers.
I need to state for the record that Callum Keith Rennie is Sex. On. A. Stick. And I would happily watch him do the goddamn dishes.
Okay, moving on.
This episode has two themes weirdly tangled up in each other: revenge and grief. On the revenge side, we've got Ray seeking revenge on Marcus Ellery and Brandauer seeking revenge on Welsh. The link between the two is made plain by Fraser's Bacon quote:
FRASER: You know, Ray, Francis Bacon once wrote that revenge is a kind of wild justice which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
RAY: Did Francis Bacon ever meet Marcus Ellery?
FRASER: It's unlikely. Bacon died in 1626.
RAY: Well, there you go. If he had, he woulda whistled a different tune.
Ray is very clear that his vendetta against Ellery is extralegal; Brandauer, on the other hand, is trying to use the law to get revenge on Welsh. And one way we know that Brandauer is the antagonist and Ray the protagonist is that while Brandauer is defeated in the end, Ray lets go of his quest for revenge and in fact reaffirms his own relationship with the law:
RAY: Thanks.
ELLERY: For what?
RAY: For making me what I am. A cop.
That's the more obvious and surfacy theme, but I think that grief may be the more important. "I think he's grieving," Fraser says of Diefenbaker. "His breed is uncommonly sensitive. They feel sorrow profoundly." (Notice also that this line is accompanied by Ray slamming his binoculars into the grille of the crypt window in a gesture of frustration: again pointing to the fact that whatever Ray may feel, it's most likely to get expressed physically, and as anger.) And this ties back to one of the two conversations that seem to me to be the heart of the episode:
FRASER: I didn't realize you were married.
RAY: I was. Not anymore.
BRONCO: That is so sad.
RAY: Two careers, she worked at the State's Attorney's office. Just didn't work out.
JIMMY: Oh, I recognize that tone of voice. That's a "Hey, it's no big deal" tone of voice, you know?
BRONCO: He would know. His wife left him. He was a broken window. Glass everywhere.
GLADYS: What about you, dear? Are you married?
FRASER: No, ma'am, I'm not. But I am acquainted with loss and, on occasion, loneliness.
GLADYS: Oh, yes. Loneliness. It may sound silly, but I wonder how the sun will feel today when it's blocked out by the moon.
FRASER: Yes. It does seem sometimes as though the border between life and death is very poorly guarded.
BRONCO: Yep. And if you're carrying the wrong passport, you wind up in a lower drawer in one of these places.
JIMMY: The thing is, who the hell has all the passports? I mean, I wouldn't be here if I had the other passports, you know?
FRASER: Or would you? That's the question, isn't it?
RAY: Right. Right. Like you can't go forward until you go backward. Look, I tried to run away from my past, but you can't do it 'cause it's in your skin, it stays with you. You gotta retrace your steps to figure out how you got here.
(Parenthetically, I love the description of Jimmy as a broken window, and I love that they gave it to a Cuban cigar smuggler. Also, I love it because, as we're going to see, it's an incredibly apt description of Ray, too.)
Grief is what ties these very disparate characters together--Ray, Fraser, Gladys, and Jimmy. And Diefenbaker. And it makes it appropriate that Ray is staking out a graveyard. He's mourning the death of something he himself doesn't know how to explain--in fact, he's mourning a lot of things. But one is the person he thinks he would have been if not for Marcus Ellery:
RAY: Me, I never wanted to be a cop in the first place. Always wanted to be something else.
FRASER: Why didn't you become something else?
RAY: That is the reason I am here today.
A second is his relationship with Stella--not just his marriage, but the entire story of it. I was realizing as I rewatched that Ray's reactions would not be off if we were to learn that Stella was dead, and the fact that Stella isn't dead does not trivialize Ray's grief, just as the Cuban cigar smuggler becomes "a broken window" when his wife leaves him. But Ray's relationship with Stella is all tangled up, at least in his head, with his relationship with Marcus Ellery. He can't talk about one without talking about the other. He's determined that the relationship with Ellery will end one way or another during the eclipse, and part of what fuels his rage and grief is that, on some level, that means that his relationship with Stella is ending, too. (Not that Ray doesn't continue to try to have a relationship with Stella, but I think all of us, including Ray, know it's doomed.)
And finally, I think Ray is mourning for himself. He confesses to Ellery that he intended, maybe, to kill him, but he tells the people in the crypt, "My whole life, it starts and ends with this one guy." This is a terminus for Ray; whether he intends to kill himself, get himself killed, or is simply not thinking past the confrontation with Ellery, he sees this as a very clear ending. And the symbolism backs him up. He falls with Ellery into Ellery's mother's open grave (I learn from the IMDb that Peter Bray, who played Ellery, was 6'7", so the fact that Ray is absolutely dwarfed by him--which I think loops back very interestingly to Ray's childhood memory--is in one sense fortuitous, but in another sense deliberate, since no one else is ever in frame with Ellery at the graveyard), the eclipse moves over them, and then Ray is lying in the grave alone, with the dreamcatcher on his chest. (And, yes, it's somewhere between surrealism and contrarealism that Ellery got out of that grave without either (a.) help or (b.) squashing Ray like a bug.)
But that isn't the end. Ray isn't dead. And I think it also matters tremendously that it's Fraser who comes and pulls him out, who helps him to resurrect himself symbolically, if not literally. (Ray yanking him into the grave and walking off is another of those things I categorize under Ray's childlike-ness. You do it because it's funny, not because you've thought about it.)
Ray was already, in "Burning Down the House," talking about this assignment as a new life, a chance to reinvent himself, and that register is revisited in this episode:
RAY: You know, Fraser, when they offered me this assignment, they made it sound kind of normal. They say, Hey, Ray, here's a chance to start over, ditch the past. What's the catch? I say. Oh, your partner's Canadian. Canadian? I got nothing against Canadians except for the time when they won the World Series--
FRASER: Two times.
RAY: --which I'm willing to overlook.
FRASER: Thank you.
RAY: But at no time did they say, Oh by the way, you'll be working with a Mountie who's got a wolf who's a florist.
Later, of course, Ray himself expressly disavows this idea in the passage I quoted earlier: "I tried to run away from my past, but you can't do it 'cause it's in your skin, it stays with you." But this is still a chance at something completely new, and that something is largely represented by Ray's relationship with Fraser. He's clearly gotten spooked since "Burning Down the House," since they reprise their argument from the end of that episode with the roles reversed:
RAY: You invade my castle, you track me down, you almost get your head shot off--you wanna tell me why?
FRASER: Well, two reasons. First, I brought you a present.
RAY: For what?
FRASER: For your birthday.
RAY: It's not my birthday.
FRASER: Yes, it is.
RAY: No, it's not.
FRASER: Well, I think you're wrong about that. Y'see, Ray Vecchio was born--
RAY: Hey, let's . . . just drop that, okay, Fraser? You and I both know I'm not Ray Vecchio.
FRASER: You're not?
RAY: No.
FRASER: You're sure about that?
RAY: I don't even look like him.
FRASER: Well, you could've had plastic surgery.
RAY: You are unhinged.
FRASER: You think?
RAY: Yes, I think. Look, I'm not Ray. I mean, I am Ray, but I'm not Ray Vecchio. I'm . . . Kowalski. Stanley Raymond Kowalski.
FRASER: Your name is Stanley Kowalski?
RAY: Look, my dad had a thing for Brando. Me, it was always Steve McQueen. So I go by Ray.
FRASER: Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Ray Kowalski.
In the comments on my "BDtH" post,
heresluck and I advanced the theory that Ray is a stray cat, and I think what's going on here is that Ray is trying to put on the brakes, trying to keep Fraser from getting too close. "Most tenants I get to know," his landlady tells Fraser. "But him? Very secretive." Ray Kowalski is a loner, and Fraser's offered friendship makes him nervous. He's trying to get Fraser to back off (FRASER: Who's the target? RAY: None of your business.) and Fraser won't go. I said in my post on "The Blue Line" (and pardon me while I commit the ultimate narcissism of quoting myself): "In this, as in so many other things, Fraser seems to have been equipped with a toggle switch where most people have a dimmer. [...] as far as personal relationships are concerned, once he's given his loyalty, it is apparently literally impossible to make him take it back." Fraser has decided Ray is his friend, and that's the end of it (at least until things get more complicated--and a thousand blessings on Paul Gross and the other writers for making things get more complicated--but we aren't there yet). There are two important things about Fraser's friendship with Ray in this episode. One is about Fraser: he comes after Ray to make him go back to the station to protect Ray Vecchio. He can't budge him, so he stays, though not without nagging. But then, after Ellery has failed to show up for the funeral, Fraser, instead of saying, Now will you come back to the station? says, "Y'know, Ray, I'm pretty sure he'll come. We have time." Fraser hasn't set aside his loyalty to Ray Vecchio, but he has also managed to see past that loyalty, to see that Ray Kowalski, not being a snowmobile part, really does have something more important he has to do.The second thing, which happens right before the very symbolic dreamcatcher-confrontation-resurrection sequence, is (I think) that Fraser gives Ray back himself (and this is the second conversation I think is the heart of the episode):
RAY: I lied, you know.
FRASER: You did?
RAY: Yeah. About Stella, to Stella. When I was in the bank--she thought I humiliated myself on purpose to stall for time so she could get away. I never told her any different. She thought I was a hero. I played along. Whole marriage based on a lie. I was a con job then, and I'm a con job now.
FRASER: Y'know, Ray, in my limited experience with the subject, I've found that very few life-long bonds are formed based on whether one partner or the other urinated in their clothing. I am willing to gamble--not with money, mind you, but I am willing to gamble that Stella looked beyond that one incident and saw the whole person.
RAY: Whaddya mean?
FRASER: In December 1988, a young boy was being held in a warehouse. You went in, even though you knew your cover had been blown. You drew fire, you were wounded, yet you managed to rescue the boy, your first citation. In December 1990, in a jewelry store, you single-handedly held off three gunmen, saving four innocent lives. Your second citation. In September 1993, you [Ray tries to stop him, but Fraser just keeps going] faced down three murderers and you brought them to justice. Your third citation. You're a good policeman, Ray, and I would be proud to call you my partner. And my friend.
Fraser is reminding Ray that there is more to him than the con job he calls himself. (Also notice the way that we go from talking about Stella and Ray's marriage to Fraser and Ray's partnership.) He's giving Ray back something that clearly Ray has lost, his ability to identify himself as a cop and to be proud of it. And the question of identity, as I said about "BDtH" is tremendously important. In this episode, again, it's couched explicitly in terms of how Ray got to be where he is. And the question being posed is whether a person has to stay inside the identity created by answering that question, or if they can choose to be somebody else. Ray has obviously gotten trapped in thinking he can only be that shamed and terrified thirteen-year-old boy, that that's the only thing that defines him. So it is a lovely and generous thing Fraser does in telling Ray a different story, a different answer to the question.
Ray talks a good line of cynicism, much like Ray Vecchio does:
RAY: Look, Fraser. I've humped this job for a long time. Bad hours, bad food, and bad guys. And for what?
FRASER: For the pride and honor of knowing that we make it possible for good people to tuck their kids in at night, turn out the lights, and know they'll be safe.
RAY: You gotta be kidding me.
FRASER: No, I'm not.
RAY: You believe all that?
FRASER: Yes, I do.
RAY: Never doubt it?
FRASER: Never.
But this, like his repeated assertion in "BDtH" that he doesn't risk his neck for anybody, is conclusively proven in "Eclipse" to be untrue. The citations Fraser lists demonstrate that Ray does risk his neck for other people, and unlike Ray Vecchio, who has to be cajoled, nudged, harassed, and herded into helping people outside the confines of his job (see, for example, "White Men Can't Jump to Conclusions"), Ray Kowalski sees something suspicious and he heads straight for it, despite the fact that he is emphatically in this graveyard on personal business:
RAY: Oh, that's good.
FRASER: Is this the target of the stake-out?
RAY: Nah, just something's queer. Let's check it out.
Ray is a good cop, and I think the key tenet of his resurrection is his own recognition of that fact and of the fact that it's something he wants to be--something worth being.
Other matters, in no particular order:
*heart*Ray's glasses*heart*
Also, Dief. For everything ever.
I like the little sideswipe at romantic conventions (we are going to come back to this like a ton of bricks in "Strange Bedfellows"):
BRONCO: So, did you get the girl?
RAY: Yeah, I got the girl. That was Stella, my wife.
BRONCO: She married you even after, you know, what you did.
RAY: Yeah, but that's not the point.
Sure, Ray "gets the girl." But he gets her via the opposite of heroism (public humiliation and then lying about it), and he doesn't get to keep her. The fairy tale only has a happy ending if you know when to stop.
I wonder if I was subliminally remembering this exchange when I started using the metaphor of Fraser as grail knight:
RAY: I'm like one of those, um, whatchamacallem, knights looking for the Holy Grill.
FRASER: Grail.
RAY: What?
FRASER: Holy Grail.
RAY: You sure?
FRASER: I'm pretty sure it's not a diner.
RAY: Grill, Grail, whatever. I'm just trying to settle an old debt.
Either way, this is a place where we see a correspondence between Ray and Fraser. Grail knights.
Also, notice here that Ray doesn't like being corrected. And Fraser's vocabulary ("germane," "prudent") makes him nervous.
On the subject of Ray's glasses.
It is necessary for one's peace of mind to assume that Ray's glasses are symbolic. Because if his vision is really as bad as this episode shows, he really really really should not be driving without them. But I think they are symbolic:
FRASER: Y'know, I don't mean to be critical, but you might want to consider some remedial practice on the target range.
RAY: Hey. I'm a good shot.
FRASER: By what criteria? You fired seven rounds--you haven't been within fifty meters of your target.
RAY: I'm a good shot, I just need my glasses. I also left them in the tomb.
FRASER: No, you didn't. Here.
RAY: Why didn't you tell me you had 'em?
FRASER: Well, I didn't realize you were blind.
RAY: I'm not blind, I just don't see all that good.
And then Ray stands up and shoots the guns out of Jimmy and Bronco's hands. This shows us that not all of Ray's claims are braggadocio; he is in fact a superlatively good shot. But only with his glasses on. Like the opposite of Clark Kent, who takes his glasses off to become Superman.
This is also one of the very few--possibly the only--place in the episode where Fraser is provoked out of his Batman voice. He's being very Mountie, with the cabbage and the trout, and that graceful obliviousness to Ray's hostility. So at the same time that he's reaching out to Ray, he's also protecting himself by retreating into his armor, just as he deflates the act of giving Ray the dreamcatcher by (a.) doing it under gunfire and (b.) extended persiflage on the subject of eagle feathers, transferring Ray's (and our) attention from the gift to the stick-up-the-ass pedantry.
(As it happens, the National Eagle Repository does exist. However, you must be enrolled in a federally recognized tribe to get a feather or other part of a dead eagle. Also, the repository is in Denver.)
Ray calls Fraser a freak four times in this episode.
1. FRASER: It's your birthday present. I dropped it.
RAY: Are you a freak?
2. RAY: What are you talking about?
FRASER: The eagle feather.
RAY: You are a freak.
3. As Fraser is carrying Gladys toward the crypt.
4. FRASER: You know, Ray, my father once told me that the sky isn't just above you, that if you look at the horizon you'll see that it actually touches the ground. So if you think about it, wherever you go, you are actually walking in the sky.
RAY: You're a freak.
FRASER: Understood.
The first time is at least derogatory by implication, but by the fourth time, it's morphed into a kind of affectionate code.
And then, of course, there's the question of the homoerotic subtext, which is actually in this episode not so much with the sub:
RAY: Can I ask you something? Do you find me attractive?
JIMMY: Well, I wouldn't say "attractive."
BRONCO: No. "Cute," maybe.
GLADYS: Well, I'd say "well-favored."
RAY: Did I ask you?
JIMMY: Sorry. I thought you were asking all of us.
RAY: Well, I wasn't. So zip. [to Fraser] Well? Find me attractive?
FRASER: In what sense?
RAY: In the sense of, you know, you being a woman?
FRASER: Do I think you're an attractive woman?
RAY: No. No. I'm not the woman. You're the woman.
FRASER: I'm the woman.
GLADYS: No, I'm a woman.
RAY: Butt out.
BRONCO: Well, she is.
RAY: Well, I know she's a woman. I'm asking Fraser to pretend he's a woman. Okay?
GLADYS: Oh. Can you do that, dear?
FRASER: Well, I have done that, yes.
JIMMY: So have I. It was rather fun.
[Bronco sniggers]
RAY: Look, you three zip. And you--you pretend you're a woman, okay? . . . D'you find me attractive?
FRASER: Very much so, yes.
RAY: You're not just saying that?
FRASER: Well, I'm not really qualified to judge, Ray.
[Ray starts laughing]
GLADYS: What's funny about that? He isn't.
RAY: It just sounds like something my wife would say.
There is no getting around the sheer weirdness of Ray's question. He never explains why he wants to know. It's certainly not that he's looking for general opinions, or he'd be more receptive to the contributions from the peanut gallery. He wants Fraser's opinion. And he makes Fraser very uncomfortable with it, too. Mounties are not supposed to shift from foot to foot like that. It's not being asked to imagine he's a woman that makes Fraser nervous; as he says, he's done that before. Also notice that, as with the conversation about Ray's citations, Fraser and Stella seem to be mutually substitutable variables.
And then there's the question of Ray Vecchio and those nine kilograms of heroin. Ray Vecchio's probity is not in doubt--FRASER: Ray Vecchio is not corrupt, sir. WELSH: Oh yeah. You know that and I know that.--except that, well, apparently there are nine kilograms of heroin missing. And Brandauer's hatchet job fails because Ray Kowalski is not Ray Vecchio and the snitch Siracusa can't pick him out of the line-up. We don't know how things would have gone if Ray Vecchio had actually been there. Could Siracusa have fingered him? We know Ray Vecchio is honest, but at the same time, his bacon is saved at the end of the episode, not by a ringing defense of his character, but by some superb brinksmanship on Ray Kowalski's part. We don't get answers.
Again, there's a lot more pure wordplay in this episode than has hitherto been the case. For instance, this riddling exchange between Ray and Tom the caretaker:
TOM: This thing doesn't work.
RAY: Whaddya mean it doesn't work? It's just a bottle. It doesn't work or not work.
TOM: If nothing comes out of it, what is it?
RAY: It's empty.
TOM: But it isn't empty. So it must be broken.
RAY: If it was broken, it'd be empty.
TOM: Exactly. So. It's not working!
[Ray breaks off the neck of the bottle with his knife]
RAY: There. Now it's broken, and it's working.
TOM: Good man.
It occurs to me that Ray may, in this episode, be going through a kind of fairytale katabasis (the descent to the underworld). He leaves his normal world behind (the police station and the repeated and repeatedly ignored phonecalls from Welsh), he encounters a guardian figure and solves the riddle (Tom), he's staking out a graveyard from a crypt, for crying out loud, he meets a ghost from his past, literally falls into a grave (I don't know of any canonical associations of katabases with eclipses, but it sure makes sense), and returns, a stronger man, to his normal world.
If they did that on purpose, it's really intensely clever.
And, because I am a complete sucker for the meta, I love this exchange:
FRASER: So you need Ray Vecchio.
WELSH: By end of shift. Five o' clock.
FRASER: Which one, sir?
WELSH: Which one what?
FRASER: Which Ray Vecchio. The detective formerly known as Ray Vecchio or the current detective known as the former Ray Vecchio?
WELSH: I can't go in there and tell them that Ray Vecchio is undercover on another operation and that this guy at the desk is not the real Ray Vecchio. If I do, these morons'll have it on the six o' clock news, and Ray Vecchio will end up as the dead body leading off at eleven. See? The only way to handle this is we gotta bluff it out.
Once again, the implausible pretense is shifted from the production level where it would be on a normal TV show (Callum Keith Rennie is not David Marciano, but we have to pretend he is) to the story level (Ray Kowalski is not Ray Vecchio, but we have to pretend he is). And once again, the fulcrum for the shift is Welsh.
I'm going to end with the beginning: the dialogue-less sequence in Ray's apartment. Which I love for myriad reasons. One is the amount that Callum Keith Rennie conveys with his face and body. Two is the fact that we're being given the chance to watch Ray assembling his game face. Notice the layers. From tank top to white t-shirt to dark colored t-shirt and the overcoat. Three, the clutter of Ray's apartment (which I only wish my eyesight was good enough to make out more clearly): as I said, this is world-building, not just setting. Four: Ray, is it honestly too much effort to boil water? And I love the face he makes when he tastes his impromptu mocha.
Ray is a difficult and complicated person, and he has an existence separate from Fraser. The show is clearly putting a good deal of thought and effort into making that happen, making Fraser understand--and us as well--that unlike Ray Vecchio, he can't take anything about this Ray for granted.
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Date: 2008-09-23 04:30 am (UTC)And, yeah, Fraser's essentially saying to Ray, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." And he's right.